“should be required reading” - the L.A. times
WINNER OF THE 2024 oregon book award; semifinalist for the pacific northwest book award
recommended by Harpers bazaar, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Salon, TIME, Vulture, Goodreads, The Financial Times, Bustle, The Star Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Debutiful, Powells, etc
“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”
So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
Published in 2023 by Flatiron Books (U.S. / Canada) and Canongate (U.K. + Commonwealth)
Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize:
“I devoured every startling, lyrical, haunting page of wolfish. a stunning achievement, It left me feeling like one of the pack.”
Marc Bekoff, PhD, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals:
“[a] beautifully written and passionate book that deserves wide, global attention.”
V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage, longlisted for the Women’s Prize:
“a marvel: a beautiful piece of work as wide-ranging as it is precise….you won’t want to miss this.”
Lyz Lenz, author of God Land:
“I can't stop talking about Wolfish...a triumph of a debut.”
Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning:
“an exhilarating book—intricate, thoughtful, and thick with connections.”
About Erica
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her essays, which are often about the intersection of inner worlds and outer environments, appear or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Emergence, Orion, The Yale Review, and other publications. She is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron/Macmillan, 2023), which won the 2024 Oregon Book Award, and Bodies In Heat: Love in a Changing Climate, forthcoming from Flatiron (US) and Faber (UK).
Winner of a 2025 Oregon Career Fellowship, she is a contributing editor at Orion magazine, a 2025 Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, and a 2026 Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University.
Photo: Andrea Lonas, 2022